What is a Customer Experience Management System?

A customer experience management system is technology that helps you manage your organisation’s interactions with customers, both current and potential. The system should work with all your customer-facing touchpoints: organising, automating and synchronising them so that you can service all your existing customers and respond quickly to issues and new business

Customer information all in one place

A customer experience management system stores all your customers’ information in one place, with real-time updates that are easy to share with your various teams.

You’ll be able to see a history of your interactions with customers from their behaviour (such as purchase or contact) to how it made them feel (customer feedback), revealing where you got customer service right, and where you maybe got it wrong.

The survey engine

A good customer experience management system should be able to track valuable customer feedback across all your customer. This is usually done using a survey engine – you present customer surveys at various touchpoints and pull the responses into your CX platform.

You should be able to send surveys through a variety of methods from web and SMS surveys all the way through to Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and live chat modules. And it doesn’t have to be a long survey either – one or two questions as a particular touchpoint can still be enough to gather the feedback you need.

CX dashboards

A customer experience management system will usually surface your customer feedback and CX data in the form of dashboards. These provide a single view of what’s happening whether it’s your NPS score or a real-time view of the key trends in customer feedback.

The most advanced systems offer customisable, role-based dashboards – these are great because not everyone in the organisation needs the same data, so they allow you to control who sees what. For example, your leadership team won’t care about the latest comments from your website checkout survey, while call centre agents won’t be interested in the NPS score for your retail stores.

By customising the data you show to different roles, you’re able to show people the metrics that matter most to them, so they know where they can make an impact. Providing everything to everybody on the other hand risks information overload and doesn’t provide people with actionable insights.

See how real-time, role-based CX dashboards work

Customer response management and closed-loop

The most successful organisations go a step further than simply collecting and analysing customer feedback and use their system to respond to customers directly.

This is generally known as a closed-loop system as is a great way to build stronger relationships with customers by responding directly to their feedback and can help prevent customer issues from becoming much bigger problems.

A CX platform that allows you to close the loop with customers allows you to do this in the same platform where you’re collecting feedback and managing customer contacts so you can track customer feedback from the survey response all the way through to resolution.

Integration with other tech

Customer feedback isn’t the only data your organisation has – what website analytics, CRM systems like Salesforce and even HR and finance data?

Most of these platforms have APIs which allow you to send the data to other systems too.

Being able to integrate them into your CX platform can be a huge benefit as you get better visibility of the customer experience and its impact on your business.

Take website analytics for example – you may be seeing an increase in people abandoning their cart, but it’s hard to identify why looking only at the analytics data. But combine it with customer feedback and you can drill down to see what customers are saying too, so you can quickly and easily see the impact.

With CRM systems, integrating your data is a great way to get a ‘one customer’ view – you can tie feedback to contact records and start to tie your CX metrics into operational metrics like win-rate and revenue to really understand the impact of your customer experience on the bottom line.

Analytics

Having data is one thing, but knowing what to do with it is quite another. So look for the analytics capability in a CX platform.

Most platforms will include some level of analytics – after all, few organisations have a team of data scientists ready and waiting – that will help you understand what the data means.
There are plenty of types of analysis too:

Statistical analysis – from simply relating one variable to another (e.g. how is NPS affected by call waiting time?) to a multivariate regression that takes hundreds of competing variables and models the precise impact of each one

Text analysis – this technology takes open text responses and automatically sorts and analyses them so you don’t have to wade through them all. There are different levels of sophistication here from those that identify topics to those that analyse sentiment too so you can see which topics are talked of positively or negatively to spot trends.

Key driver analysis – identifies key relationships to surface the most important drivers of a particular metric like NPS or revenue so you can see which areas to focus on

CX platforms that offer this as a built-in capability can help you go from raw data to valuable customer insights without hundreds of hours of manual work.